Pride

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 2 (4 BCE – 451 CE) (2009)

  times seven; he was a God of Battles. Constantine himself told Eusebius of Caesarea that one of the crucial experiences in his Milvian Bridge victory had been a vision of ‘a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and an inscription, CONQUER BY THIS’.4 The association of the sun and the Cross was no accident. A military leader and a ruthless politician rather than an abstract thinker, Constantine was probably not very clear about the difference between a universal sun cult and the Christian God – at least to start with. As he began showering privileges on the Christian clergy, it is unlikely that many of them considered whether the Emperor should be given a theological cross- examination before they accepted their unexpected gifts. What interested Constantine was the Christian God rather than the Christians. It would hardly have been worth his while from a political point of view to court favour from Christians, for, however one calculates their numbers, they were still a decided minority in the empire, and noticeably weak in those crucial power blocs, the army and the Western aristocracy. A simple grant of toleration would have been enough to delight the battered Church. Constantine went much further than that. There is no doubt that he came to a deeply personal if rather capricious involvement in the Christian faith; according to Eusebius, he regularly delivered sermons to his no doubt slightly embarrassed courtiers.5 Over his reign, he gave the Church an equal place alongside the traditional official cults and lavished wealth on it. Christianity could now embark on its long intoxication with architecture, previously a necessarily restricted passion. Among his many other donations were fifty monumental copies of the Bible commissioned from Bishop Eusebius’s specialist scriptorium in Caesarea: an extraordinary expenditure on creating de luxe written texts, for which the parchment alone would have required the death of around five thousand cows (so much for Christian disapproval of animal sacrifice). It is possible that two splendidly written Bibles of very early date, now called respectively the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus after their historic homes, are survivors from this gift.6 The Emperor favoured Christians in senior positions and went as far as being baptized just before his death. There were hesitations: the designs on imperial coinage were always a barometer of official policy and propaganda preoccupations because they were frequently changed, and some mints were still producing coins with non-Christian sacred subjects as late in his reign as 323.7 Traditionalists in Italy would have been pleased by Constantine building a new temple dedicated to the imperial cult, but the lion’s share of imperial patronage was now going to the Christians, and at the same time many temples were being stripped of precious metals at imperial command.8

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  But he distinguished between the yoke of Christ and the tyranny of the pope. He persevered and succeeded. "I have conflicts," he wrote to Farel, "severe conflicts, but they are a good school for me." He converted many Anabaptists, who were wisely tolerated in the territory of Strassburg, and brought to him from the city and country their children for baptism. He was consulted by the magistrates on all important questions touching religion. He conscientiously attended to pastoral care, and took a kindly interest in every member of his flock. In this way he built up in a short time a prosperous church, which commanded the respect and admiration of the community of Strassburg.511 Unfortunately, this Church of the Strangers lasted only about twenty-five years, and was extinguished by the flames of sectarian bigotry, though not till after many copies had been made from it as a model. An exclusive Lutheranism, under the lead of Marbach, obtained the ascendency in Strassburg, and treated the Calvinistic Christians as dangerous heretics. When Calvin passed through the city on his way to Frankfort, in August, 1556, he was indeed honorably received by John Sturm and the students, who respectfully rose to their feet in his presence, but he was not allowed to preach to his own congregation, because he did not believe in the dogma of consubstantiation. A few years later the Reformed worship was altogether forbidden by order of the Council, Aug. 19, 1563.512 § 87. The Liturgy of Calvin. I. La forme des prieres et chantzs ecclesiastiques, avec la maniere d’administrer les sacremens et consacrer le marriage, selon la coutume de l’Eglise ancienne, A.D. 1542. In Opera, VI. 161–210 (from a copy at Stuttgart; the title is given in the old spelling without accents). Later editions (1543, 1545, 1562, etc.) add: "la visitation des malades," and "comme on l’observe à Genève." An earlier edition of eighteen Psalms appeared at Strassburg, 1539. (See Douen, Clément Marot, I. 300 sqq.) An edition of the liturgy with the Psalms was printed at Strassburg, Feb. 15, 1542. (See Douen, l.c. 305, and 342 sqq.) A copy of an enlarged Strassburg ed. of 1545, entitled La forme des prieres et chantzs ecclesiastiques, was preserved in the Public Library at Strassburg till Aug. 24, 1870, when it was burnt at the siege of the city in the Franco-German War (Douen, I. 451 sq.). II. Ch. d’Héricault: Ouvres de Marot. Paris, 1867.—Felix Bovet: Histoire du psautier des églises réformées. Neuchâtel, 1872.—O. Douen: Clément Marot et le Psautier Huguenot. Étude historique, littéraire, musicale et bibliographique; contenant les mélodies primitives des Psaumes, etc. Paris (à’imprimerie national), 1878 sq. 2 vols. royal 8vo. A magnificent work published at the expense of the French Republic on the recommendation of the Institute. The second volume contains the harmonies of Goudimel.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  M Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ’s Great Society I’m a self-confessed raw country boy and guitar-playing fool. —Elvis Presley (1956) Lyndon wasn’t upper class at all. Country boy, grown up in the hills. —Virginia Foster Durr, Alabama civil rights activist (1991) ost will remember the famous photograph of Elvis Presley standing alongside President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. But why is it forgotten that Presley gained the friendship of Lyndon Baines Johnson? At Graceland, Presley added a three-television console like the one LBJ had in the Oval Office; “the King” also hung in his home an “All the Way with LBJ” bumper sticker from the 1964 presidential campaign, and posed for a publicity photo with the president’s daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson, who at the time was dating the actor George Hamilton. Presley and Johnson at first seem to be the oddest of couples—but they had more in common than their separate celebrity worlds would suggest. Both became national figures who challenged—whose very lives disrupted—the historically toxic characterization of poor whites. 1 When Elvis stormed onto the national scene in 1956, he seemed to be doing everything he could to act nonwhite. He openly embraced black musical style, black pompadour hair, and flashy outfits that had been associated with blacks as well. His gyrations caused his critics to compare his wildly sexualized dancing to the “hootchy-kootchy,” or burlesque striptease, and the rebellious zoot suit crowd. His phenomenal fame and adoring fans helped to propel him to The Ed Sullivan Show, and from there to the silver screen. He soon owned a stable of Cadillacs. Elvis had achieved what no white trash working-class male had ever dreamt possible: he was at once cool and sexually transgressive and a “country boy.” No longer a freakish rural outcast, as in the past, Elvis was a “Hillbilly Cat,” someone many teenage boys wished they could be. 2 Lyndon Johnson’s sudden elevation to the office of chief executive on November 22, 1963, came as a great shock to the nation. Eerily replaying what had happened a century earlier, a second unelected Johnson entered the presidency after a shocking assassination. But this time, instead of the sorrow- laden, war-weary Lincoln, the nation had lost the vigorous, photogenic, East

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Bill had instructed him to leave the Ranko Novak pieces out—and because there was no way to authenticate those anyway, Yale didn’t see the harm; they weren’t relevant to the conversation. Charlie and Dolly listened intently, too, and Yale realized he hadn’t explained this all to Charlie, not in so many words. Well, Charlie had been so busy. “It’s incredible,” Allen said. “I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t heard of Foujita.” And because Bill didn’t jump in, Yale said, “He was a fixture in Paris in the twenties, a celebrity. Just about the only Japanese man in France. There was an unfortunate period during the war when he moved home and made propaganda. But no one cares about that anymore.” Allen laughed. “Don’t they? I think my old man would care.” Yale leaned close, like he was telling a secret. “Well, one of his drawings just fetched four hundred grand in Paris. I don’t think that buyer minded.” Charlie gave Yale a look, and it took Yale a moment to decipher the look as impressed, proud. It was rare that Charlie saw him in action. If Yale had a wife, she’d be dragged along to every dinner with a donor, every alumni event. She’d wear a short dress and flatter the men and then imitate the wives on the way home. Or, well, no. Maybe if he were straight he’d have married someone like Charlie, too busy with her own life to play the nodding and smiling game. The doorbell rang, and Bill and Dolly both jumped to answer it. Yale had imagined that a person named Roman would be built like a soldier, but the young man who stepped inside half frozen was small and blond, Morrissey glasses magnifying his eyes. He wore a black turtleneck, black trousers. “I’m so sorry to be late,” he said, handing Dolly a small poinsettia that must’ve been on post-Christmas sale at Dominick’s. He looked like an undergrad, in fact, although Yale soon found out he was twenty-six, that he’d started an MFA in painting before switching to art history. Roman turned down a drink and perched awkwardly on the end of the sofa to chat with the Sharps about the research he’d done in Paris last summer. He had a quiet voice, kept his hands glued to his knees. He said, “My mom was worried I wouldn’t want to come back.” Esmé laughed and said, “Yes, why did you?” “Well. I mean, I—my education, and my—” “She’s teasing ,” Allen said. “Christ, Esmé, you’ve traumatized the kid!” Roman was adorable, and Yale figured him first of all for gay—why else the strangeness from Bill?—but also for the type who didn’t even know it yet himself. Yale might have wound up like that if he hadn’t, sophomore year at Michigan, gotten Mark Breen as his macroeconomics TA—older, beautiful, confident, persuasive. Five minutes in Mark’s apartment, and Yale couldn’t remember his own past or anything else he’d ever felt.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Cassiodorus the statesman became Cassiodorus the monk, and unwittingly exchanged the service of the Goths for the service of humanity. The place of his retirement was the monastery of Viviers (Monasterium Vivariense), at the foot of Mt. Moseius,983 in southwestern Italy, which he had himself founded and richly endowed. Upon the mountain he built another monastery (Castellense) in which the less accomplished monks seem to have lived, while the society of Viviers was highly cultivated and devoted to literature. Those monks who could do it were employed in copying and correcting classical and Christian MSS., while the others bound books, prepared medicine and cultivated the garden.984 He moved his own large library to the monastery and increased it at great expense. Thus Viviers in that sadly confused and degenerate time became an asylum of culture and a fountain of learning. The example he set was happily followed by other monasteries, particularly by the Benedictine, and copying of MSS. was added to the list of monastic duties. By this means the literature of the old classical world has come down to us. And since the initiation of the movement was given by Cassiodorus he deserves to be honored as the link between the old thought and the new. His life thus usefully spent was unusually prolonged. The year of his death is uncertain, but it was between 570 and 580. The Works of Cassiodorus are quite numerous. They are characterized by great erudition, ingenuity and labor, but disfigured by an incorrect and artificial style. Some were written while a statesman, more while a monk.985 1. The most important is the Miscellany,986 in twelve books, a collection of about four hundred rescripts and edicts issued by Cassiodorus in the King’s name while Quaestor and Magister officiorum, and in his own name while Pretorian prefect. He gives also in the sixth and seventh books a collection of formulas for the different offices, an idea which found imitation in the Middle Age. From the Miscellany a true insight into the state of Italy in the period can be obtained. One noticeable feature of these rescripts is the amount of animation and variety which Cassiodorus manages to give their naturally stiff and formal contents. This he does by ingeniously changing the style to suit the occasion and often by interweaving a disquisition upon some relevant theme. The work was prepared at the request of friends and as a guide to his successors, and published between 534 and 538. 2. His Ecclesiastical History, called Tripartita,987 is a compilation. His own part in it is confined to a revision of the Latin condensation of Sozomen, Socrates and Theodoret, made by Epiphanius Scholasticus. It was designed by Cassiodorus to supply the omissions of Rufinus’ translation of Eusebius, and was indeed with Rufinus the monastic text-book on church history in the Middle Age. But it is by no means a model work, being obscure, inaccurate and confused. 3.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  patronage of any one secular monarch or nobleman and proved far greater in its influence than the restrictions of a single kingdom. The founder, Duke Guillaume of Aquitaine, had endowed the abbey lavishly but made unusually few demands in return, in reward for which generosity monastic posterity gratefully entitled him ‘the Pious’. A century after the foundation, a series of exceptionally shrewd and capable abbots built on this freedom of manoeuvre; they took their cue both from a provision in Duke Guillaume’s founding charter placing them under the pope’s special protection and from the example of Fleury, that much older Frankish monastery which, with exceptional and ruthless enterprise, had pioneered a special relationship with Rome (see p. 360). In 1024 Odilo, Abbot of Cluny from 994 to 1049, followed Fleury’s example in gaining exclusive papal privileges; he also began major rebuilding and enlargement campaigns at the abbey, which by the end of the eleventh century produced the final version of the prodigy church (see Plate 13).2 One should never underestimate the significance of architecture in Christianity and particularly not in the era of reform which now emerged. There was a vast amount of church-building, precisely because to rebuild a church building was regarded as a sacramental sign of institutional and devotional renewal in the Church: each new church was a reform in stone. One chronicler from Cluny saw the Christian world as clothing itself with ‘a white mantle of churches’, having safely passed the watershed of 1000, when the end of the world might have been expected (Cluny made rather a fuss about this millennium, while it is not at all clear that others did).3 Worship in the church of Cluny itself was renewed in spectacular style amid the builders’ scaffolding. Its monk-clergy celebrated an unbroken round of Masses and offices, while the centrepiece of these subsidiary dramatic performances were High Masses unequalled elsewhere in their splendour and solemnity. Western Europeans marvelled at this offering to God, and when they hastened to imitate it by endowing their own versions of Cluny, the abbots of Cluny harnessed this enthusiasm in a new way. Rather than simply giving their blessing to new independent abbeys in the traditional Benedictine manner, they demanded that each foundation should form part of a new international organization run by the abbot of Cluny himself, as ‘priories’ to his abbey: they would form a Cluniac ‘Order’ – the first monastic organization to bear this title – in which the abbot would progress round the priories and priors would gather at the mother house on a regular basis. Moreover, the abbots of Cluny discovered a special and appropriately international purpose for their growing spiritual empire. Unusually and surprisingly for a great monastery, they did not make their own church into a

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Alban, probably a Roman soldier, died as the British proto-martyr in the Diocletian persecution (303), and left the impress of his name on English history.12 Constantine, the first Christian emperor, was born in Britain, and his mother, St. Helena, was probably a native of the country. In the Council of Arles, A.D. 314, which condemned the Donatists, we meet with three British bishops, Eborius of York (Eboracum), Restitutus of London (Londinum), and Adelfius of Lincoln (Colonia Londinensium), or Caerleon in Wales, besides a presbyter and deacon.13 In the Arian controversy the British churches sided with Athanasius and the Nicene Creed, though hesitating about the term homoousios.14 A notorious heretic, Pelagius (Morgan), was from the same island; his abler, though less influential associate, Celestius, was probably an Irishman; but their doctrines were condemned (429), and the Catholic faith reëstablished with the assistance of two Gallic bishops.15 Monumental remains of the British church during the Roman period are recorded or still exist at Canterbury (St. Martin’s), Caerleon, Bangor, Glastonbury, Dover, Richborough (Kent), Reculver, Lyminge, Brixworth, and other places.16 The Roman dominion in Britain ceased about A.D. 410; the troops were withdrawn, and the country left to govern itself. The result was a partial relapse into barbarism and a demoralization of the church. The intercourse with the Continent was cut off, and the barbarians of the North pressed heavily upon the Britons. For a century and a half we hear nothing of the British churches till the silence is broken by the querulous voice of Gildas, who informs us of the degeneracy of the clergy, the decay of religion, the introduction and suppression of the Pelagian heresy, and the mission of Palladius to the Scots in Ireland. This long isolation accounts in part for the trifling differences and the bitter antagonism between the remnant of the old British church and the new church imported from Rome among the hated Anglo-Saxons. The difference was not doctrinal, but ritualistic and disciplinary. The British as well as the Irish and Scotch Christians of the sixth and seventh centuries kept Easter on the very day of the full moon in March when it was Sunday, or on the next Sunday following. They adhered to the older cycle of eighty-four years in opposition to the later Dionysian cycle of ninety-five years, which came into use on the Continent since the middle of the sixth century.17 They shaved the fore-part of their head from ear to ear in the form of a crescent, allowing the hair to grow behind, in imitation of the aureola, instead of shaving, like the Romans, the crown of the head in a circular form, and leaving a circle of hair, which was to represent the Saviour’s crown of thorns. They had, moreover—and this was the most important and most irritating difference—become practically independent of Rome, and transacted their business in councils without referring to the pope, who began to be regarded on the Continent as the righteous ruler and judge of all Christendom.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Part 4 (300 – 1300, Rome) (2009)

  the time of the pious and energetic King Alfred (reigned 871–99), the kings of Wessex had done their best to fight off invasion and occupation by Danish and Viking armies to create a version of Carolingian monarchy, just at the time when the Carolingians themselves were descending into quarrels and failure. Alfred’s successors Aethelstan (reigned 924–39) and Edgar (reigned 944–75) achieved the united English kingdom anticipated in the Church of Augustine’s mission and in the writings of Bede (see pp. 341–2). The uniting of England provoked an outburst of pride which might almost be styled nationalist, and which had a distinctive and galvanizing effect on the English Church. Reforms in England were the work of a small group of great reformers whom King Edgar made bishops and archbishops. Aethelwold, a courtier of King Aethelstan, who had become a monk and from 963 was bishop in Edgar’s royal capital of Winchester, was a scholar and dynamic teacher who inspired a series of decaying monasteries to adopt the Benedictine Rule as their standard of life, having himself translated that Rule from Latin into Old English. His unusual impact on the English Church left it one individual feature not often found elsewhere in Europe, and which was even extended after the Norman Conquest of 1066: the creation of cathedral churches which, up to Henry VIII’s sixteenth- century dissolutions, were also monasteries, with a prior and monks instead of a dean and canons. The capital, Winchester, was itself one; another was Worcester, another Canterbury, though the cathedral canons of York ‘Minster’ never succumbed to reorganization into the monastic life. Dunstan, who had been Abbot of Glastonbury when Aethelwold was there, was Archbishop of Canterbury from 959. He was both a great statesman, who presided over King Edgar’s quasi-imperial coronation at Bath in 973, and a zealous promoter of Aethelwold’s Benedictine project throughout the kingdom (engagingly if surprisingly, he also took an interest in personally annotating a manuscript of no-holds-barred erotic verse by the Latin poet Ovid, which still exists in the Bodleian Library in Oxford). Oswald of Worcester, a monk of Danish descent, was equally energetic in monastic foundations and refoundations across the English Midlands from Worcester to Ramsey; Edgar promoted him to the Archbishopric of York in 971. Notably, all these scholars were as concerned to write in Old English as in Latin, developing with pride a vernacular literary tradition which had most unusually been fostered by the writings of a king, Alfred of Wessex. That emphasis on the vernacular might well have altered the patterns of Christianity in northern Europe, if England rather than Cluny had proved to be the powerhouse of Christian change in the next century.1 Cluny’s glory days came later than the English revival. The abbey outgrew the

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He visited Worms, Spires, Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle, the old seats of the empire, and spent much time at the court of Henry III., where he was very kindly treated. After the death of Gregory at Cologne, 1048, Hildebrand went to Cluny, the nursery of a moral reformation of monasticism. According to some reports, he had been there before. He zealously gave himself to ascetic exercises and ecclesiastical studies under the excellent abbot Hugo, and became prior of the convent. He often said afterwards that he wished to spend his life in prayer and contemplation within the walls of this sacred retreat. But the election of Bishop Bruno of Toul, the cousin of Emperor Henry III., to the papal chair, at the Diet of Worms, brought him on the stage of public action. "Reluctantly," he said, "I crossed the Alps; more reluctantly I returned to Rome." He advised Bruno (either at Cluny or at Besancon) not to accept the triple crown from the hands of the emperor, but to await canonical election by the clergy and people of Rome. He thus clearly asserted, for the first time, his principle of the supremacy of the Church over the State. Bruno, accompanied by Hildebrand, travelled to Rome as a pilgrim, entered the city barefoot, was received with acclamations, canonically elected, and ascended the papal chair on Feb. 12, 1049, as Leo IX. From this time on, Hildebrand was the reigning spirit of the papacy. He understood the art of ruling through others, and making them feel that they ruled themselves. He used as his aide-de-camp Peter Damiani, the severe monk and fearless censor of the immoralities of the age, who had conquered the world within and helped him to conquer it without, in the crusade against simony and concubinage, but died, 1072, a year before Hildebrand became pope.8 § 5. Hildebrand and Leo IX. 1049–1054. The moral reformation of the papacy began with Hildebrand as leader.9 He resumed the work of the emperor, Henry III., and carried it forward in the interest of the hierarchy. He was appointed cardinal-subdeacon, treasurer of the Roman Church, and abbot of St. Paul’s. He was repeatedly sent as delegate to foreign countries, where he acquired an extensive knowledge of affairs. He replenished the empty treasury and became wealthy himself through the help of a baptized Jew, Benedictus Christianus, and his son Leo, who did a prosperous banking business. But money was to him only a means for exalting the Church. His great object was to reform the clergy by the destruction of two well-nigh universal evils: simony (Acts 8:18), that is. the traffic in ecclesiastical dignities, and Nicolaitism (Rev. 2:6, 15), or the concubinage of the priests. In both respects he had the full sympathy of the new pope, and was backed by the laws of the Church. The reformation was to be effected in the regular way of synodical legislation under the personal direction of the pope.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Great evils had arisen out of this practice, especially in Italy, where ambitious priests lingered about the antechambers of courts and practised the vice of adulation, vitium adulationis.63 The legislation against lay appointments was opened at the Synod of Rheims, 1049, under the influence of Leo IX. It declared that no priest should be promoted to office without the election of clergy and people. Ten years later, 1059, the Synod of Rome pronounced any appointment of cleric or presbyter to benefice invalid, which was made by a layman.64 The following year, 1060, the French synods of Tours and Vienne extended the prohibition to bishops. It remained for Gregory to stir up all Europe over the question who had the right of investiture. By abolishing this custom, Gregory hoped to emancipate the clergy from the vassalage of the State, and the property of the Church from the feudal supervision of the prince, as well as to make the bishops the obedient servants of the pope. The contest continued under the following popes, and was at last settled by the compromise of Worms (1122). The emperor yielded only in part; for to surrender the whole property of the Church to the absolute power of the pope, would have reduced civil government to a mere shadow. On the other hand, the partial triumph of the papacy contributed very much to the secularization of the Church. § 15. Gregory VII. and Henry IV. The conflict over investiture began at a Roman synod in Lent (Feb. 24–28), 1075, and brought on the famous collision with Henry IV., in which priestcraft and kingcraft strove for mastery. The pope had the combined advantages of superior age, wisdom, and moral character over this unfortunate prince, who, when a mere boy of six years (1056), had lost his worthy father, Henry III., had been removed from the care of his pious but weak mother, Agnes, and was spoilt in his education. Henry had a lively mind and noble impulses, but was despotic and licentious. Prosperity made him proud and overbearing, while adversity cast him down. His life presents striking changes of fortune. He ascended and descended twice the scale of exaltation and humiliation. He first insulted the pope, then craved his pardon; he rebelled again against him, triumphed for a while, was twice excommunicated and deposed; at last, forsaken and persecuted by his own son, he died a miserable death, and was buried in unconsecrated earth. The better class of his own subjects sided against him in his controversy with the pope. The Saxons rose in open revolt against his tyranny on the very day that Hildebrand was consecrated (June 29, 1073). This synod of 1075 forbade the king and all laymen having anything to do with the appointment of bishops or assuming the right of investiture.65 A synod held in November, 1075, positively forbade bishops, abbots, and other ecclesiastics receiving ecclesiastical appointments from king or any temporal lord whatsoever.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  We have no right to impeach Gregory’s sincerity. But he was clearly inconsistent in disclaiming the name, and yet claiming the thing itself. The real objection is to the pretension of a universal episcopate, not to the title. If we concede the former, the latter is perfectly legitimate. And such universal power had already been claimed by Roman pontiffs before Gregory, such as Leo I., Felix, Gelasius, Hormisdas, in language and acts more haughty and self-sufficient than his. No wonder, therefore that the successors of Gregory, less humble and more consistent than he, had no scruple to use equivalent and even more arrogant titles than the one against which he so solemnly protested with the warning: "God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble."227 But it is a very remarkable fact, that at the beginning of the unfolding of the greatest power of the papacy one of the best of popes should have protested against the antichristian pride and usurpation of the system. § 52. The Writings of Gregory. Comp. the second part of Lau’s biography, pp. 311 sqq., and Adolf Ebert: Geschichte der Christlich-Lateinischen Literatur, bis zum Zeitalter Karls der Grossen. Leipzig, 1874 sqq., vol. I. 516 sqq. With all the multiplicity of his cares, Gregory found time for literary labor. His books are not of great literary merit, but were eminently popular and useful for the clergy of the middle ages. His theology was based upon the four oecumenical councils and the four Gospels, which he regarded as the immovable pillars of orthodoxy; he also accepted the condemnation of the three chapters by the fifth oecumenical council. He was a moderate Augustinian, but with an entirely practical, unspeculative, uncritical, traditional and superstitious bent of mind. His destruction of the Palatine Library, if it ever existed, is now rejected as a fable; but it reflects his contempt for secular and classical studies as beneath the dignity of a Christian bishop. Yet in ecclesiastical learning and pulpit eloquence he had no superior in his age. Gregory is one of the great doctors or authoritative fathers of the church. His views on sin and grace are almost semi-Pelagian. He makes predestination depend on fore-knowledge; represents the fallen nature as sick only, not as dead; lays great stress on the meritoriousness of good works, and is chiefly responsible for the doctrine of a purgatorial fire, and masses for the benefit of the souls in purgatory. His Latin style is not classical, but ecclesiastical and monkish; it abounds in barbarisms; it is prolix and chatty, but occasionally sententious and rising to a rhetorical pathos, which he borrowed from the prophets of the Old Testament. The following are his works: 1. Magna Moralia, in thirty-five books. This large work was begun in Constantinople at the instigation of Leander, bishop of Seville, and finished in Rome. It is a three-fold exposition of the book of Job according to its historic or literal, its allegorical, and its moral meaning.228

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Gregory displays in his correspondence with his rival a singular combination of pride and humility. He was too proud to concede to him the title of a universal bishop, and yet too humble or too inconsistent to claim it for himself. His arguments imply that he would have the best right to the title, if it were not wrong in itself. His real opinion is perhaps best expressed in a letter to Eulogius of Alexandria. He accepts all the compliments which Eulogius paid to him as the successor of Peter, whose very name signifies firmness and solidity; but he ranks Antioch and Alexandria likewise as sees of Peter, which are nearly, if not quite, on a par with that of Rome, so that the three, as it were, constitute but one see. He ignores Jerusalem. "The see of the Prince of the Apostles alone," he says, "has acquired a principality of authority, which is the see of one only, though in three places (quae in tribus locis unius est). For he himself has exalted the see in which he deigned to rest and to end his present life [Rome]. He himself adorned the see [Alexandria] to which he sent his disciple [Mark] as evangelist. He himself established the see in which he sat for seven years [Antioch]. Since, then, the see is one, and of one, over which by divine authority three bishops now preside, whatever good I hear of you I impute to myself. If you believe anything good of me, impute this to your own merits; because we are one in Him who said: ’That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that all may be one in us’ (John xvii. 21)."224

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  boy” singing about his blue suede shoes lacked an “exaggerated hillbilly dialect.” That same year, Hedda Hopper, the Hollywood gossip columnist, was just as relieved to find that Elvis had not been offered the film part of Li’l Abner. 70 The real Elvis was not a hillbilly at all. He was a poor white boy from Tupelo, Mississippi. He was the son of a sharecropper. He was born into poverty in a shotgun shack situated in the wrong part of town. Yet when he put a guitar in his hand and millions ogled at his frenzied (some thought violent) dance moves, he was at once seen as defying middle-class norms and behaving as a sort of hillbilly—well suited to his new home of Tennessee. A friend of his confirmed the hillbilly image when he remarked to a reporter in 1956 that all Elvis had to do was “jes’ show hisself and the gals git to thrashin’ round and pantin’ like mountain mules.” 71 And so it was in 1956 that country music, pop culture, and class politics all came together on the national stage. That year, Tennessee’s governor, Frank Clement, became the Democratic Party’s golden (country) boy. He was chosen to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an honor that placed him in the running for the vice presidential nomination. In anticipation of Clement’s big speech, a writer for the Nation called the thirty- five-year-old, six-foot-tall, dark-haired governor “one of the handsomest men in American politics.” He was known for stumping in the Tennessee mountains, and folks admired him for his “barefoot boy sincerity”—a clear allusion to the “honest hillbilly” myth. Even his store-bought suits projected allegiance to the common man: the “type of rig a successful mountain man would wear on a visit to Nashville.” 72 His countrified eloquence covered the full range of registers: his voice boomed, then sank to a whisper, or, as one reporter claimed, he “sang like a mountain fiddle and died away.” He used brimstone threats and usually ended with a prayerful benediction. Like Dewey Short, he lit up with alliteration. To top it all off, he had the support of the grandest hillbilly governor, “Big Jim” Folsom of Alabama, who stood six foot eight and was known for taking his shoes off onstage and campaigning with his “strawberry-pickers,” as the Folsom band was called. In 1954, at a large Democratic primary gathering, he told Clement to use all his powers on the rostrum, saying he should “go out there guttin’, cuttin’, and struttin.” “Kissing Jim,” fond of whiskey and women, gave his blessing to the flamboyant Clement. 73

• From The Second Sex (1949)

  The penis is singularly adapted to play this role of “double” for the little boy: for him it is both a foreign object and himself; it is a plaything, a doll, and it is his own flesh; parents and nurses treat it like a little person. So, clearly, it becomes for the child “an alter ego usually craftier, more intelligent, and more clever than the individual”;7 because the urinary function and later the erection are midway between voluntary processes and spontaneous processes, because it is the impulsive, quasi-foreign source of subjectively experienced pleasure, the penis is posited by the subject as himself and other than himself; specific transcendence is embodied in it in a graspable way, and it is a source of pride; because the phallus is set apart, man can integrate into his personality the life that flows from it. This is why, then, the length of the penis, the force of the urine stream, the erection, and the ejaculation become for him the measure of his own worth.8 It is thus a constant that the phallus is the fleshly incarnation of transcendence; since it is also a constant that the child feels transcended, that is, frustrated in his transcendence by his father, the Freudian idea of the castration complex will persist. Deprived of this alter ego, the little girl does not alienate herself in a graspable thing, does not reclaim herself: she is thus led to make her entire self an object, to posit herself as the Other; the question of knowing whether or not she has compared herself with boys is secondary; what is important is that, even without her knowing it, the absence of a penis keeps her from being aware of herself as a sex; many consequences result from this. But these constants we point out nevertheless do not define a destiny: the phallus takes on such importance because it symbolizes a sovereignty that is realized in other areas. If woman succeeded in affirming herself as subject, she would invent equivalents of the phallus: the doll that embodies the promise of the child may become a more precious possession than a penis.9 There are matrilineal societies where the women possess the masks in which the collectivity alienates itself; the penis then loses much of its glory. Only within the situation grasped in its totality does anatomical privilege found a truly human privilege. Psychoanalysis could only find its truth within a historical context.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He was animated with the unwavering conviction that the Lord himself had committed to him, as the successor of Peter, the care of the whole church.586 He anticipated all the dogmatical arguments by which the power of the papacy was subsequently established. He refers the petra, on which the church is built, to Peter and his confession. Though Christ himself—to sum up his views on the subject—is in the highest sense the rock and foundation, besides which no other can be laid, yet, by transfer of his authority, the Lord made Peter the rock in virtue of his great confession, and built on him the indestructible temple of his church. In Peter the fundamental relation of Christ to his church comes, as it were, to concrete form and reality in history. To him specially and individually the Lord intrusted the keys of the kingdom of heaven; to the other apostles only in their general and corporate capacity. For the faith of Peter the Lord specially prayed in the hour of his passion, as if the standing of the other apostles would be the firmer, if the mind of their leader remained unconquered. On Peter rests the steadfastness of the whole apostolic college in the faith. To him the Lord, after his resurrection, committed the care of his sheep and lambs. Peter is therefore the pastor and prince of the whole church, through whom Christ exercises his universal dominion on earth. This primacy, however, is not limited to the apostolic age, but, like the faith of Peter, and like the church herself, it perpetuates itself; and it perpetuates itself through the bishops of Rome, who are related to Peter as Peter was related to Christ. As Christ in Peter, so Peter in his successors lives and speaks and perpetually executes the commission: "Feed my sheep." It was by special direction of divine providence, that Peter labored and died in Rome, and sleeps with thousands of blessed martyrs in holy ground. The centre of worldly empire alone can be the centre of the kingdom of God. Yet the political position of Rome would be of no importance without the religious considerations. By Peter was Rome, which had been the centre of all error and superstition, transformed into the metropolis of the Christian world, and invested with a spiritual dominion far wider than her former earthly empire. Hence the bishopric of Constantinople, not being a sedes apostolica, but resting its dignity on a political basis alone, can never rival the Roman, whose primacy is rooted both in divine and human right. Antioch also, where Peter only transiently resided, and Alexandria, where he planted the church through his disciple Mark, stand only in a secondary relation to Rome, where his bones repose, and where that was completed, which in the East was only laid out. The Roman bishop is, therefore, the primus omnium episcoporum, and on him devolves the plenitudo potestatis, the solicitudo omnium pastorum, and communis cura universalis ecclesiae.587

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Let the kings and princes of the earth know and feel how great ye are—how exalted your power! Let them tremble to despise the commands of your Church! "But upon the said Henry do judgment quickly, that all men may know that it is not by fortune or chance, but by your power, that he has fallen! May he thus be confounded unto repentance, that his soul may be saved in the day of the Lord!" This is the extreme of hierarchical arrogance and severity. Gregory always assumed the air of supreme authority over kings and nobles as well as bishops and abbots, and expects from them absolute obedience. Sardinia and Corsica he treated as fiefs.36 To the Spanish princes, in 1073, he wrote that from of old Spain had belonged to St. Peter, and that it belonged to no mortal man but to the Apostolic see. For had not the Holy See made a grant of Spanish territory to a certain Evulus on condition of his conquering it from pagan hands?37 Alfonso of Castile and Sancho of Aragon, he reminded that St. Paul had gone to Spain and that seven bishops, sent by Paul and Peter, had founded the Christian Church in Spain.38 Philip I., king of France, he coolly told, that every house in his kingdom owed Peter’s Pence, and he threatened the king, in case he did not desist from simony, to place his realm under the interdict.39 A few months later in a letter to Manasses, archbishop of Rheims, he called the king a rapacious wolf, the enemy of God and religion.40 He summoned the king of Denmark, Sueno, to recognize the dependence of his kingdom upon Rome and to send his son to Rome that he might draw the sword against the enemies of God, promising the son a certain rich province in Italy for his services.41 Boleslav, duke of Poland, he admonished to pay certain monies to the king of Russia, whose son, as we are informed in another letter, had come to Rome, to secure his throne from the pope.42 The Hungarian king, Solomon, was reminded that King Stephen had given his kingdom to St. Peter and that it belonged of right to Rome, 43 and he was sharply rebuked for having received his crown from the king of the Germans as a fief and not having sought it from Rome. On Demetrius, duke of Dalmatia, Gregory conferred the royal title on condition of his rendering a yearly payment of two hundred pieces of silver to himself and his papal successors. To Michael, Byzantine emperor, he wrote, expressing the hope that the Church of Constantinople as a true daughter might be reconciled to its mother, the Church of Rome.44 In other communications to the emperor, Gregory made propositions concerning a crusade to rescue the Holy Land.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  As heathenism had still the preponderance in Rome, where it was hallowed by its great traditions, Constantine, by divine command as he supposed,45 in the year 330, transferred the seat of his government to Byzantium, and thus fixed the policy, already initiated by Domitian, of orientalizing and dividing the empire. In the selection of the unrivalled locality he showed more taste and genius than the founders of Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, or Washington. With incredible rapidity, and by all the means within reach of an absolute monarch, he turned this nobly situated town, connecting two seas and two continents, into a splendid residence and a new Christian Rome, "for which now," as Gregory of Nazianzen expresses it, "sea and land emulate each other, to load it with their treasures, and crown it queen of cities."46 Here, instead of idol temples and altars, churches and crucifixes rose; though among them the statues of patron deities from all over Greece, mutilated by all sorts of tasteless adaptations, were also gathered in the new metropolis.47 The main hall in the palace was adorned with representations of the crucifixion and other biblical scenes. The gladiatorial shows, so popular in Rome, were forbidden here, though theatres, amphitheatres, and hippodromes kept their place. It could nowhere be mistaken, that the new imperial residence was as to all outward appearance a Christian city. The smoke of heathen sacrifices never rose from the seven hills of New Rome except during the short reign of Julian the Apostate. It became the residence of a bishop who not only claimed the authority of the apostolic see of neighboring Ephesus, but soon outshone the patriarchate of Alexandria and rivalled for centuries the papal power in ancient Rome.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Accordingly, after his triumphal entrance into Rome, he had his statue erected upon the forum with the labarum in his right hand, and the inscription beneath: "By this saving sign, the true token of bravery, I have delivered your city from the yoke of the tyrant."36 Three years afterwards the senate erected to him a triumphal arch of marble, which to this day, within sight of the sublime ruins of the pagan Colosseum, indicates at once the decay of ancient art, and the downfall of heathenism; as the neighboring arch of Titus commemorates the downfall of Judaism and the destruction of the temple. The inscription on this arch of Constantine, however, ascribes his victory over the hated tyrant, not only to his master mind, but indefinitely also to the impulse of Deity;37 by which a Christian would naturally understand the true God, while a heathen, like the orator Nazarius, in his eulogy on Constantine, might take it for the celestial guardian power of the "urbs aeterna." At all events the victory of Constantine over Maxentius was a military and political victory of Christianity over heathenism; the intellectual and moral victory having been already accomplished by the literature and life of the church in the preceding period. The emblem of ignominy and oppression38 became thenceforward the badge of honor and dominion, and was invested in the emperor’s view, according to the spirit of the church of his day, with a magic virtue.39 It now took the place of the eagle and other field-badges, under which the heathen Romans had conquered the world. It was stamped on the imperial coin, and on the standards, helmets, and shields of the soldiers. Above all military representations of the cross the original imperial labarum shone in the richest decorations of gold and gems; was intrusted to the truest and bravest fifty of the body guard; filled the Christians with the spirit of victory, and spread fear and terror among their enemies; until, under the weak successors of Theodosius II., it fell out of use, and was lodged as a venerable relic in the imperial palace at Constantinople. After this victory at Rome (which occurred October 27, 312), Constantine, in conjunction with his eastern colleague, Licinius, published in January, 313, from Milan, an edict of religious toleration, which goes a step beyond the edict of the still anti-Christian Galerius in 311, and grants, in the spirit of religious eclecticism, full freedom to all existing forms of worship, with special reference to the Christian.40 The edict of 313 not only recognized Christianity within existing limits, but allowed every subject of the Roman empire to choose whatever religion he preferred.41 At the same time the church buildings and property confiscated in the Diocletian persecution were ordered to be restored, and private property-owners to be indemnified from the imperial treasury.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Among the writings of the Reuchlinists against the opponents of the new learning, the Letters of Unfamed Men—Epistolae virorum obscurorum — occupy the most prominent place. These epistles are a fictitious correspondence of Dominican monks who expose their own old-fogyism, ignorance and vulgarity to public ridicule in their barbarous German-Latin jargon, which is called kitchen-Latin, Küchenlatein, and which admits of no adequate translation. They appeared anonymously, but were chiefly written by Ulrich von Hutten and Crotus Rubeanus whose German name was Johannes Jaeger. The authors were friends of Luther, but Crotus afterwards fell out with the Reformation, like Erasmus and other Humanists. Ulrich von Hutten, 1488–1523, after breaking away from the convent in which his father had placed him six years before, pursued desultory studies in the University of Cologne, developed a taste for the Humanistic culture and travelled in Italy. In 1517, he returned to Germany and had a position at the court of the pleasure-loving Albrecht, archbishop of Mainz, a patron of the new learning. He was crowned with the poet’s crown by Maximilian and was hailed as the future great epic poet of Germany by Erasmus, but later incurred the hostility of that scholar who, after Hutten’s death, directed against his memory the shafts of his satire. He joined Franz von Sickingen in standing ready to protect Luther at Worms. Placed under the ban, he spent most of his time after 1520, till his death, in semi-concealment at Schlettstadt, Basel and at Zürich under the protection of Zwingli. Hutten’s life at Cologne and in Rome gave him opportunity enough to find out the obscurantism of the Dominicans and other foes of progress as well as the conditions prevailing at the papal court. In 1517, he edited Valla’s tract on the spurious Donation of Constantine and, with inimitable irony, dedicated it to Leo X. In ridicule and contempt it excelled everything, Janssen says, that had been written in Germany up to that time against the papacy. As early as 1513, Hutten issued epigrams from Italy, calling Julius II. "the corrupter of the earth, the plague of mankind."1075 His Latin poem, the Triumph of Reuchlin, 1518, defended the Hebrew scholar, and called for fierce punishment upon Pfefferkorn. It contained a curious woodcut, representing Reuchlin’s triumphal procession to his native Pforzheim, and his victory over Hoogstraten and Pfefferkorn with their four idols of superstition, barbarism, ignorance and envy.1076

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  CHRYSOSTOM. Or he had five brothers, that is, the five senses, to which he was before a slave, and therefore he could not love Lazarus because his brethren loved not poverty. Those brethren have sent thee into these torments, they cannot be saved unless they die; otherwise it must needs be that the brethren dwell with their brother. But why seekest thou that I should send Lazarus? They have Moses and the Prophets. Moses was the poor Lazarus who counted the poverty of Christ greater than the riches of Pharaoh. (Heb. 11:26.) Jeremiah, cast into the dungeon, was fed on the bread of affliction; and all the prophets teach those brethren. (Jer. 38:9.) But those brethren cannot be saved unless some one rise from the dead. For those brethren, before Christ was risen, brought me to death; He is dead, but those brethren have risen again. For my eye sees Christ, my ear hears Him, my hands handle Him. From what we have said then, we determine the fit place for Marcion and Manichæus, who destroy the Old Testament. See what Abraham says, If they hear not Moses and the prophets. As though he said, Thou doest well by expecting Him who is to rise again; but in them Christ speaks. If thou wilt hear them, thou wilt hear Him also. GREGORY. (in Hom. 40.) But the Jewish people, because they disdained to spiritually understand the words of Moses, did not come to Him of whom Moses had spoken. AMBROSE. Or else, Lazarus is poor in this world, but rich to God; for not all poverty is holy, nor all riches vile, but as luxury disgraces riches, so holiness commends poverty. Or is there any Apostolical man, poor in speech, but rich in faith, who keeps the true faith, requiring not the appendage of words. To such a one I liken him who oft-times beaten by the Jews offered the wounds of his body to be licked as it were by certain dogs. Blessed dogs, unto whom the dropping from such wounds so falls as to fill the heart and mouth of those whose office it is to guard the house, preserve the flock, keep off the wolf! And because the word is bread, our faith is of the word; the crumbs are as it were certain doctrines of the faith, that is to say, the mysteries of the Scriptures. But the Arians, who court the alliance of regal power that they may assail the truth of the Church, do not they seem to you to be in purple and fine linen? And these, when they defend the counterfeit instead of the truth, abound in flowing discourses. Rich heresy has composed many Gospels, and poor faith has kept this single Gospel, which it had received. Rich philosophy has made itself many gods, the poor Church has known only one. Do not those riches seem to you to be poor, and that poverty to be rich?